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PDRESS^Q^^g ROYAL COLONIAL INSTITUTE 

-ed February Thirteen, Nineteen Hundred ^ Eighteen 

^2/ WALTER RALEIGH 



NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



SOME GAINS OF 
THE WAR 

AN ADDRESS 

TO THE ROYAL COLONIAL INSTITUTE 
Delivered February 13, 1918 

BY 

WALTER RALEIGH 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

Price Ten Cents 






COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



APR -9 1918 



©CLA49281)2 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

Our losses in this War continue to be enormoiis, 
and we are not yet near to the end. So it may seem 
absurd to speak of our gains, of gains that we have 
already achieved. But if you will look at the thing in 
a large light, I think you will see that it is not absurd. 

I do not speak of gains of territory, and prisoners, 
and booty. It is true that we have taken from the 
Germans about a million square miles of land in 
Africa, where land is cheap. We have taken more 
prisoners from them than they have taken from us, 
and we have whole parks of German artillery to set 
over against the battered and broken remnants of 
British field-guns which were exhibited in Berlin — 
a monument to the immortal valour of the little old 
Army. I am speaking rather of gains which cannot 
be counted as guns are counted, or measured as land 
is measured, but which are none the less real and im- 
portant. 

The Germans have achieved certain great material 
gains in this War, and they are fighting now to hold 
them. If they fail to hold them, the Germany of the 
war-lords is ruined. She will have to give up all her 
bloated ambitions, to purge and live cleanly, and pain- 
fully to reconstruct her prosperity on a quieter and 
sounder basis. She will not do this until she is forced 
to it by defeat. No doubt there are moderate and 

1 



2 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

sensible men in Germany, as in other countries; but 
in Germany they are without influence, and can do 
nothing. War is the national industry of Prussia; 
Prussia has knit together the several states of the 
larger Germany by means of war, and has promised 
them prosperity and power in the future, to be 
achieved by war. You know the Prussian doctrine of 
war. Every one now knows it. According to that 
doctrine it is a foolish thing for a nation to wait till 
it is attacked. It should carefully calculate its own 
strength and the strength of its neighbours, and, when 
it is ready, it should attack them, on any pretext, sud- 
denly, without warning, and should take from them 
money and land. When it has gained territory in this 
fashion, it should subject the population of the con- 
quered territory to the strictest laws of military serv- 
ice, and so supply itself with an instrument for new 
and bolder aggression. This is not only the German 
doctrine ; it is the German practice. In this way and 
no other modern Germany has been built up. It is a 
huge new State, founded on force, cemented by fear, 
and financed on speculative gains to be derived from 
the great gamble of war. You may have noticed that 
the German people have not been called on, as yet, 
to pay any considerable sum in taxation towards the 
expenses of this war. Those expenses (that, at least, 
was the original idea) were to be borne wholly by the 
conquered enemy. There are hundreds of thousands 
of Germans to-day who firmly believe that their war- 
lords will return in triumph from the stricken field, 
bringing with them the spoils of war, and scattering 
a largess of peace and plenty. 

To us it seems a marvel that any people should ac- 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 3 

cept such a doctrine, and should willingly give their 
lives and their fortunes to the work of carrying it out 
in practice; but it is not so marvellous as it seems. 
The German peoples are brave and obedient, and so 
make good soldiers ; they are easily lured by the hope 
of profit ; they are naturally attracted by the spectacu- 
lar and sentimental side of war ; above all, they are so 
curiously stupid that many of them do actually be- 
lieve that they are a divinely chosen race, superior to 
the other races of the world. They are very carefully 
educated, and their education, which is ordered by 
the State, is part of the military machine. Their 
thinking is done for them by officials. It would re- 
quire an extraordinary degree of courage and inde- 
pendence for a German youth to cut himself loose and 
begin thinking and judging for himself. It must al- 
ways be remembered, moreover, that their recent his- 
tory seems to justify their creed. I will not go back 
to Frederick the Great, though the history of his 
wars is the Prussian handbook, whicTi teaches all the 
characteristic Prussian methods of treachery and de- 
ceit. But consider only the last two German wars. 
How, in the face of these, can it be proved to any 
German that war is not the most profitable of ad- 
ventures? In 1866 Prussia had war with Austria. 
The war lasted forty days, and Prussia had from five 
to six thousand soldiers killed in action. As a con- 
sequence of the war Prussia gained much territory, 
and established her control over the states of greater 
Germany. In 1870 she had war with France. Her 
total casualties in that war were approximately a 
hundred thousand, just about the same as our casu- 
alties in Gallipoli. From the war she gained, besides 



4 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

a great increase of strength at home, the rich prov- 
inces of Alsace and Lorraine, with all their mineral 
wealth, and an indemnity of two hundred million 
pounds, that is to say, four times the actual cost of 
the war in money. How then can it be maintained 
that war is not good business? If you say so to any 
Prussian, he thinks you are talking like a child. 

Not only were these two wars rich in profit for the 
Germans, but they did not lose them much esteem. 
There was sympathy in this country for the union of 
the German peoples, just as there was sympathy, a few 
years earlier, for the union of the various states of 
Italy. There was not a little admiration for German 
efficiency and strength. So that Bismarck, who was 
an expert in all the uses of bullying, blackmail, and 
fraud, was accepted as a great European statesman. 
I have always believed, and I still believe, that Ger- 
many will have to pay a heavy price for Bismarck — 
all the heavier because the payment has been so long 
deferred. 

The present War, then, is in the direct line of suc- 
cession to these former wars ; it was planned by Ger- 
many, elaborately and deliberately planned, on a cal- 
culation of the profits to be derived from operations 
on a large scale. 

Well, as I said, we, as a people, do not believe in 
gambling in human misery to attain uncertain specu- 
lative gains. We hold that war can be justified only 
by a good cause, not by a lucky event. The German 
doctrine seems to us impious and wicked. Though we 
have defined our war aims in detail, and the Germans 
have not dared publicly to define theirs, our real and 
sufficient war aim is to break the monstrous and in- 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 5 

human doctrine and practice of the enemy — to make 
their calculations miscarry. And observe, if their 
calculations miscarry, they have fought and suffered 
for nothing. They entered into this War for profit, 
and in the conduct of the War, though they have 
made many mistakes, they have made none of those 
generous and magnanimous mistakes which redeem 
and beautify a losing cause. 

The essence of our cause, and its greatest strength, is 
that we are not fighting for profit. We are fighting for 
no privilege except the privilege of possessing our 
souls, of being ourselves — a privilege which we claim 
also for other weaker nations. The inestimable strength 
of that position is that if the odds are against us it does 
not matter. If you see a ruffian torturing a child, and 
interfere to prevent him, do you feel that your attempt 
was a wrong one because he knocks you down f And 
if you succeed, what material profit is there in saving a 
child from torture ? We have sometimes fought in the 
past for doubtful causes and for wrong causes, but this 
time there is no mistake. Our cause is better than we 
deserve ; we embraced it by an act of faith, and it is 
only by continuing in that faith that we shall see it 
through. The little old Army, when they went to 
France in August 1914, did not ask what profits were 
likely to come their way. They knew that there were 
none, but they were willing to sacrifice themselves to 
save decency and humanity from being trampled in the 
mud. This was the Army that the Germans called a 
mercenary Army, and its epitaph has been written by 
a good poet : 

These, in the day when heaven was falling, 
The hour when earth's foundations fled, 



6 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

Followed their mercenary calling", 
And took their wages, and are dead. 
Their shoulders held the heavens suspended, 
They stood, and earth's foundations stay, 
What God abandoned these defended. 
And saved the sum of things for pay. 

We must follow their example, for we shall never 
get a better. We must not make too much of calcula- 
tion, especially when it deals with incalculable things. 
Nervous public critics, like Mr. H. G. Wells, are always 
calling out for more cleverness in our methods, for new 
and effective tricks, so that we may win the War. I 
would never disparage cleverness; the more you can 
get of it, the better ; but it is useless unless it is in the 
service of something stronger and greater than itself, 
and that is character. Cleverness can grasp ; it is only 
character that can hold. The Duke of Wellington was 
not a clever man ; he was a man of simple and honour- 
able mind, with an infinite capacity for patience, per- 
sistence, and endurance, so that neither unexpected re- 
verses alroad nor a flood of idle criticism at home could 
shake him or change him. So he bore a chief part in lay- 
ing low the last great tyranny that desolated Europe. 

None of our great wars was won by cleverness ; they 
were all won by resolution and perseverance. In all 
of them we were near to despair and did not despair. 
In all of them we won through to victory in the end. 

But in none of them did victory come in the expected 
shape. The worst of making elaborate plans of victory, 
and programmes of all that is to follow victory, is that 
the mixed event is sure to defeat those plans. Not 
every war finds its decision in a single great battle. 
Think of our war with Spain in the sixteenth century. 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 7 

Spain was then the greatest of European Powers. She 
had larger armies than we could raise ; she had more 
than our wealth, and more than our shipping. The 
newly discovered continent of America was an appan- 
age of Spain, and her great galleons were wafted lazily 
to and fro, bringing her all the treasures of the west- 
ern hemisphere. We defeated her by standing out and 
holding on. We fought her in the Low Countries, 
which she enslaved and oppressed. We refused to 
recognize her exclusive rights in America, and our 
merchant seamen kept the sea undaunted, as they have 
kept it for the last three years. When at last we 
became an intolerable vexation to Spain, she collected 
a great Armada, or war-fleet, to invade and destroy us ; 
and it was shattered, by the winds of heaven and the 
sailors of England, in 1588. The defeat of the Armada 
Vv'as the turning-point of the war, but it was not the 
end. It lifted a great shadow of fear from the hearts 
of the people, as a great shadow of fear has already 
been lifted from their hearts in the present War, but 
during the years that followed we suffered many and 
serious reverses at the hand of Spain, before peace and 
security were reached. So late as 1601, thirteen years 
after the defeat of the Armada, the King of Denmark 
offered to mediate between England and Spain, so that 
the long and disastrous war might be ended. Queen 
Elizabeth was then old and frail, but this was what she 
said — and if you want to understand why she was 
almost adored by her people, listen to her words: *I 
would have the King of Denmark, and all Princes 
Christian and Heathen to know, that England hath no 
need to crave peace; nor myself endured one hour's 
fear since I attained the crown thereof, being guarded 



8 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

with so valiant and faithful subjects. ' In the end the 
power and menace of Spain faded away, and when 
peace was made, in 1604, this nation never again, from 
that da}^ to this, feared the worst that Spain could do. 

What were our gains from the war with Spain? 
Freedom to live our lives in our own way, unthreat- 
ened; freedom to colonize America. The gains of a 
great war are never visible immediately ; they are de- 
ferred, and extended over many years. What did we 
gain by our war with Napoleon, which ended in the vic- 
tory of Waterloo ? For long years after Waterloo this 
country was full of riots and discontents ; there were 
rick-burnings, agitations, popular risings, and some- 
thing very near to famine in the land. But all these 
things, from a distance, are now seen to have been the 
broken water that follows the passage of a great storm. 
The real gains of Waterloo, and still more of Trafalgar, 
are evident in the enormous commercial and industrial 
development of England during the nineteenth cen- 
tury, and in the peaceful foundation of the great do- 
minions of Canada, Australia, and South Africa, which 
was made possible only by our unchallenged use of the 
seas. The men who won those two great battles did 
not live to gather the fruits of their victory ; but their 
children did. If we defeat Germany as completely as 
we hope, we shall not be able to point at once to our 
gains. But it is not a rash forecast to say that our chil- 
dren and children 's children will live in greater secur- 
ity and freedom than we have ever tasted. 

A man must have a good and wide imagination if he 
is to be willing to face wounds and death for the sake 
of his unborn descendants and kinsfolk. We cannot 
count on the popular imagination being equal to the 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 9 

task. Fortunately, there is a substitute for imagina- 
tion which does the work as well or better, and that 
is character. Our people are sound in instinct; they 
understand a fight. They know that a wrestler who 
considers, while he is in the grip of his adversary, 
whether he would not do well to give over, and so put 
an end to the weariness and the strain, is no sort of 
a wrestler. They have never failed under a strain of 
this kind, and they will not fail now. The people who 
do the half-hearted and timid talking are either young 
egotists, who are angry at being deprived of their per- 
sonal ease and independence ; or elderly pensive gentle- 
men, in public offices and clubs, who are no longer 
fit for action, and, being denied action, fall into mel- 
ancholy ; or feverish journalists, who live on the pro- 
ceeds of excitement, who feel the pulse and take the 
temperature of the War every morning, and then rush 
into the street to announce their fluttering hopes and 
fears; or cosmopolitan philosophers, to whom the 
change from London to Berlin means nothing but a 
change in diet and a pleasant addition to their oppor- 
tunities of hearing good music ; or aliens in heart, to 
whom the historic fame of England, * dear for her repu- 
tation through the world, ' is less than nothing ; or prac- 
tical jokers, who are calm and confident enough them- 
selves, but delight in startling and depressing others. 
These are not the people of England ; they are the para- 
sites of the people of England. The people of Eng- 
land understand a fight. 

That brings me to the first great gain of the War. 
We have found ourselves. Which of us, in the early 
months of 1914, would have dared to predict the 
splendours of the youth of this Empire — splendours 



10 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

which are now a part of our history ? We are adepts 
at self-criticism and self-depreciation. We hate the 
language of emotion. Some of us, if we were taken to 
heaven and asked what we thought of it, would say 
that it is decent, or not so bad. I suppose we are 
jealous to keep our standard high, and to have some- 
thing to say if a better place should be found. But in 
spite of all this, we do now know, and it is worth 
knowing, that we are not weaker than our fathers. 
We know that the people who inhabit these islands 
and this commonwealth of nations cannot be pushed on 
one side, or driven under, or denied a great share in 
the future ordering of the world. We know this, and 
our knowledge of it is the debt that we owe to our dead. 
It is not vanity to admit that we know it; on the 
contrary, it would be vanity to pretend that we do not 
know it. It is visible to other eyes than ours. Some 
time ago I heard an address given by a friend of mine, 
an Indian Mohammedan of warrior descent, to Univer- 
sity students of his own faith. He was urging on them 
the futility of dreams and the necessity of self-disci- 
pline and self-devotion. 'Why do the people of this 
country', he said, 'count for so much all the world 
over ? It is not because of their dreams ; it is because 
thousands of them are lying at the bottom of the sea. ' 
Further, we have not only found ourselves ; we have 
found one another. A new kindliness has grown up, 
during the War, between people divided by the bar- 
riers of class, or wealth, or circumstance. A statesman 
of the seventeenth century remarks that It is a Misfor- 
tune for a Man not to have a Friend in the World, but 
for that reason he shall have no Enemy. 1 might invert 
his maxim and say. It is a Misfortune for a Man to ha/ve 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 11 

many Enemies, hut for that reason he shall know who 
are his Friends. No Radical member of Parliament 
will again, while any of us live, east contempt on 'the 
carpet Captains of Mayfair'. No idle Tory talker will 
again dare to say that the working men of England 
care nothing for their country. Even the manners of 
railway travel have improved. I was travelling in a 
third-class compartment of a crowded train the other 
day ; we were twenty in the compartment, but it seemed 
a pity to leave any one behind, and we made room for 
number twenty-one. Nothing but a very kindly human 
feeling could have packed us tight enough for this. Yet 
now is the time that has been chosen by some of these 
pensive gentlemen that I spoke of, and by some of these 
excitable journalists, to threaten us with class-war, and 
to try to make our flesh creep by conjuring up the hor- 
rors of revolution. I advise them to take their opinions 
to the third-class compartment and discuss them there. 
It is a good tribunal, for, sooner or later, you will find 
every one there — even officers, when they are travelling 
in mufti at their own expense. I have visited this 
tribunal very often, and I have always come away from 
it with the same impression, that this people means 
to win the War. But I do not travel much in the 
North of England, so I asked a friend of mine, whose 
dealings are with the industrial North, what the work- 
people of Lancashire and Yorkshire think of the War. 
He said, 'Their view is very simple: they mean to 
win it; and they mean to make as much money out 
of it as ever they can. ' Certainly, that is very simple ; 
but before you judge them, put yourselves in their 
place. There are great outcries against profiteers, for 
making exorbitant profits out of the War, and against 



12 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

munition workers, for delaying work in order to get 
higher wages. I do not defend either af them ; they 
are unimaginative and selfish, and I do not care how 
severely they are dealt with; but I do say that the 
majority of them are not wicked in intention. A good 
many of the more innocent profiteers are men whose sin 
is that they take an offer of two shillings rather than 
an offer of eighteenpence for what cost them one and a 
penny. Some of us, in our weaker moments, might be 
betrayed into doing the same. As for the munition 
workers, I remember what Goldsmith, who had known 
the bitterest poverty, wrote to his brother. 'Avarice', 
he said, *in the lower orders of mankind is true ambi- 
tion ; avarice is the only ladder the poor can use to pre- 
ferment. Preach then, my dear Sir, to your son, not the 
excellence of human nature nor the disrespect of riches, 
but endeavour to teach him thrift and economy. Let his 
poor wandering uncle 's example be placed in his eyes. 
I had learned from books to love virtue before I was 
taught from experience the necessity of being selfish. ' 
The profiteers and the munition workers are en- 
deavouring, incidentally, to better their own position. 
But make no mistake ; the bulk of these people would 
rather die than allow one spire of English grass to be 
trodden under the foot of a foreign trespasser. Their 
chief sin is that they do not fear. They think that there 
is plenty of time to do a little business for themselves 
on the way to defeat the enemy. I cannot help re- 
membering the mutiny at the Nore, which broke out 
in our fleet during the Napoleonic wars. The mutineers 
struck for more pay and better treatment, but they 
agreed together that if the French fleet should put in 
an appearance during the mutiny, all their claims 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 13 

ghould be postponed for a time, and the French fleet 
should have their first attention. 

Employers and employed do, no doubt, find in some 
trades to-day that their relations are strained and irk- 
some. They would do well to take a lesson from the 
Army, where, with very few exceptions, there is har- 
mony and understanding between those who take or- 
ders and those who give them. It is only in the Army 
that you can see realized the ideal of ancient Rome. 

Then none was for a party. 

Then all were for the State; 
Then the great man helped the poor. 

And the poor man loved the great. 

Why is the Army so far superior to most commercial 
and industrial businesses 1 The secret does not lie in 
State employment. There is plenty of discontent and 
unrest among the State-employed railway men and 
munition workers. It lies rather in the habit of mu- 
tual help and mutual trust. If any civilian employer 
of labour wants to have willing workpeople, let him 
take a hint from the Army. Let him live with his 
workpeople, and share all their dangers and discom- 
forts. Let him take thought for their welfare before 
his own, and teach self-sacrifice by example. Let him 
put the good of the nation before all private interests ; 
and those whom he commands will do for him anything 
that he asks. 

I cannot believe that the benefits which have come to 
us from the Army will pass away with the passing of 
the War. Those who have been comrades in danger 
will surely take with them something of the old spirit 
into civil life. And those who have kept clear of the 



14 SOME GAINS OP THE WAR 

Army in order to carry on their own trades and busi- 
nesses will surely realize that they have missed the 
great opportunity of their lives. 

In a wider sense the War has brought us to an un- 
derstanding of one another. This great Common- 
wealth of independent nations which is called the 
British Empire is scattered over the surface of the 
habitable globe. It embraces people who live ten 
thousand miles apart, and whose ways of life are so 
different that they might seem to have nothing in 
common. But the War has brought them together, 
and has done more than half a century of peace could 
do to promote a common understanding. Hundreds 
of thousands of men of our blood who, before the War, 
had never seen this little island, have now made 
acquaintance with it. Hundreds of thousands of the 
inhabitants of this island to whom the Dominions were 
strange, far places, if, after the War, they should be 
called on to settle there, will not feel that they are 
leaving home. I can only hope that the Canadians 
and Anzacs think as well of us as we do of them. We 
do not like to praise our friends in their hearing, so I 
will say no more than this : I am told that a new kind 
of peerage, very haughty and very self-important, has 
arisen in South London. Its members are those house- 
holders who have been privileged to have Anzac 
soldiers billeted on them. It is private ties of this 
kind, invisible to the constitutional lawyer and the 
political historian, which make the fine meshes of the 
web of Empire. 

Because he knew that the strength of the whole 
texture depends on the strength of the fine meshes, 
Earl Grey, who died last year, will always be remem- 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 16 

bered in our history. Not many men have his oppor- 
tunity to make acquaintance with the domain that is 
their birthright, for he had administered a province of 
South Africa, and had been Governor-General of Can- 
ada. He rediscovered the glory of the Empire, as poets 
rediscover the glory of common speech. *He had 
breathed its air, ' a friend of his says, * fished its rivers, 
walked in its valleys, stood on its mountains, met it» 
people face to face. He had seen it in all the zones of 
the world. He knew what it meant to mankind. Un- 
der the British flag, wherever he journeyed, he found 
men of English speech living in an atmosphere of lib- 
erty and carrying on the dear domestic traditions of 
the British Isles. He saw justice firmly planted there, 
industry and invention hard at work unfettered by 
tyrants of any kind, domestic life prospering in natu- 
ral conditions, and our old English kindness and cheer- 
fulness and broad-minded tolerance keeping things to- 
gether. But he also saw room under that same flag, 
ample room, for millions and millions more of the 
human race. The Empire wasn't a word to him. It 
was a vast, an almost boundless, home for honest men. ' 

The War did not dishearten him. When he died, in 
August, 1917, he said, 'Here I lie on my death-bed, 
looking clear into the Promised Land. I 'm not allowed 
to enter it, but there it is before my eyes. After the 
War the people of this country will enter it, and those 
who laughed at me for a dreamer will see that I wasn't 
so wrong after all. But there's still work to do for 
those who didn 't laugh, hard work, and with much op- 
position in the way ; all the same, it is work right up 
against the goal. My dreams have come true.' 

One of the clear gains of the War is to be found in 



16 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

the increased activity and alertness of our own people. 
The motto of to-day is, *Let those now work who never 
worked before, And those who always worked now 
work the more.' Before the War we had a great na- 
tional reputation for idleness — in this island, at least. 
I remember a friendly critic from Canada who, some 
five or six years ago, expressed to me, with much dis- 
quiet, his opinion that there was something very far 
wrong with the old country; that we had gone soft. 
As for our German critics, they expressed the same 
view in gross and unmistakable fashion. Wit is not 
a native product in Germany, it all has to be imported, 
so they could not satirize us ; but their caricatures of 
the typical Englishman showed us what they thought. 
He was a young weakling with a foolish face, and was 
dressed in cricketing flannels. It would have been 
worth their while to notice what they did not notice, 
that his muscles and nerves are not soft. They learned 
that later, when the bank-clerks of Manchester broke 
the Prussian Guard into fragments at Contalmaison. 
This must have been a sad surprise, for the Germans 
had always taught, in their delightful authoritative 
fashion, that the chief industries of the young English- 
man are lawn-tennis and afternoon tea. They are a 
fussy people, and they find it difficult to understand the 
calm of the man who, having nothing to do, does it. 
Perhaps they were right, and we were too idle. The dis- 
ease was never so serious as they thought it, and now, 
thanks to them, we are in a fair way to recovery. The 
idle classes have turned their hand to the lathe and the 
plough. Women are doing a hundred things that they 
never did before, and are doing them well. The elas- 
ticity and resourcefulness that the War has developed 



SOMK GAINS OP THE WAR 17 

will not be lost or destroyed by the coining of peace. 
Least of all will those qualities be lost if we should 
prove unable, in this War, to impose our own terms on 
Germany. Then the peace that follows will be a long 
struggle, and in that struggle we shall prevail. In the 
last long peace we were not suspicious ; we felt friendly 
enough to the Germans, and we gave them every ad- 
vantage. They despised us for our friendliness and 
used the peace to prepare our downfall. That will 
never happen again. If we cannot tame the cunning 
animal that has assaulted humanity, at least we can 
and will tether him. Laws will not be necessary ; there 
are millions of others besides the seamen of England 
who will have no dealings with an unsubdued and un- 
repentant Germany. What the Germans are not taught 
by the War they will have to learn in the more tedious 
and no less costly school of peace. 

In any case, whether we win through to real peace 
and real security, or whether we are thrown back on an 
armed peace and the duty of unbroken vigilance, we 
shall be dependent for our future on the children 
who are now learning in the schools or playing in 
the streets. It is a good dependence. The children 
of to-day are better than the children whom I knew 
when I was a child. I think they have more intelli- 
gence and sympathy ; they certainly have more public 
spirit. We cannot do too much for them. The most 
that we can do is nothing to what they are going to do 
for us, for their own nation and people. I am not con- 
cerned to discuss the education problem. Formal edu- 
cation, carried on chiefly by means of books, is a very 
small part of the making of a man or a woman. But I 
am interested to know what the children are thinking. 



18 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

You cannot fathom a child's thoughts, but we know 
who are their best teachers, and what lessons have been 
stamped indelibly on their minds. Their teachers, 
whom they never saw, and whose lessons they will 
never forget, lie in graves in Flanders and France and 
Gallipoli and Syria and Mesopotamia, or unburied at 
the bottom of the sea. The runner falls, but the torch 
is carried forward. This is what Julian Grenfell, who 
gave his mind and his life to the War, has said in his 
splendid poem called Into Battle : 

And life is colour and warmth and light. 
And a striving evermore for these; 
And he is dead who will not fight, 
And who dies fighting hath increase. 

Those who died fighting will have such increase that a 
whole new generation, better even than the old, will be 
ready, no long time hence, to uphold and extend and 
decorate the Commonwealth of nations which their 
fathers and brothers saved from ruin. 

One thing I have never heard discussed, but it is the 
clearest gain of all, and already it may be called a cer- 
tain gain. After the War the English language will 
have such a position as it has never had before. It will 
be established in world-wide security. Even before 
the War, it may be truly said, our language was in no 
danger from the competition of the German language. 
The Germans have never had much success in the at- 
tempt to get their language adopted by other peoples. 
Not all the military laws of Prussia can drive out 
French from the hearts and homes of the people of 
Alsace. In the ports of the near and far East you will 
hear English spoken — pidgin English, as it is called. 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 19 

that is to say, a selection of English words suited for 
the business of daily life. But you may roam the world 
over, and you will hear no pidgin German. Before the 
War many Germans learned English, while very few 
English-speaking people learned German. In other 
matters we disagreed, but we both knew which way 
the wind was blowing. It may be said, and said truly, 
that our well-known laziness was one cause of our fail- 
ing or neglecting to learn German. But it was not 
the only cause ; and we are not lazy in tasks which we 
believe to be worth our while. Eather we had an in- 
stinctive belief that the future does not belong to the 
German tongue. That belief is not likely to be im- 
paired by the War. Armed ruffians can do some 
things, but one thing they cannot do ; they cannot en- 
dear their language to those who have suffered from 
their violence. The Germans poisoned the wells in 
South-West Africa ; in Europe they did all they could 
to poison the wells of mutual trust and mutual under- 
standing among civilized men. Do they think that these 
things will make a good advertisement for the explosive 
guttural sounds and the huddled deformed syntax of 
the speech in which they express their arrogance and 
their hate? Which of the chief European languages 
will come first, after the War, with the little nations ? 
Will Serbia be content to speak German ? Will Norway 
and Denmark feel a new affection for the speech of the 
men who have degraded the old humanity of the seas? 
Neighbourhood, kinship, and the necessities of com- 
merce may retain for the German language a certain 
measure of custom in Sweden and Switzerland, and in 
Holland. But for the most part Germans will have to 
be content to be addressed in their o^vn tongue only by 



20 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

those who fear them, or by those who hope to cheat 
them. 

This gain, which I make bold to predict for the Eng- 
lish language, is a real gain, apart from all patriotic 
bias. The English language is incomparably richer, 
more fluid, and more vital than the German language. 
Where the German has but one way of saying a thing, 
we have two or three, each with its distinctions and its 
subtleties of usage. Our capital wealth is greater, and 
so are our powers of borrowing. English sprang from 
the old Teutonic stock, and we can still coin new words, 
such as 'food-hoard' and * joy-ride', in the German 
fashion. But long centuries ago we added thousands 
of Romance words, words which came into English 
through the French or Norman-French, and brought 
with them the ideas of Latin civilization and of medi- 
aeval Christianity. Later on, when the renewed study 
of Latin and Greek quickened the intellectual life of 
Europe, we imported thousands of Greek and Latin 
words direct from the ancient world, learned words, 
many of them, suitable for philosophers, or for writers 
who pride themselves on shooting a little above the 
vulgar apprehension. Yet many of these, too, have 
found their way into daily speech, so that we can say 
most things in three ways, according as we draw on one 
or another of the three main sources of our speech. 
Thus, you can Begin, or Commence, or Initiate an 
undertaking, with Boldness, or Courage, or Resolution. 
If you are a Workman, or Labourer, or Operative, you 
can Ask, or Request, or Solicit your employer to Yield, 
or Grant, or Concede, an increase in the Earnings, or 
Wages, or Remuneration which fall to the lot of your 
Fellow, or Companion, or Associate. Your employer 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 21 

is perhaps Old, or Veteran, or Superannuated, which 
may Hinder, or Delay, or Retard the success of your 
application. But if you Foretell, or Prophesy, or Pre- 
dict that the War will have an End, or Close, or Termi- 
nation that shall not only be Speedy, or Rapid, or Ac- 
celerated, but also Great, or Grand, or Magnificent, you 
may perhaps Stir, or Move, or Actuate him to have 
Ruth, or Pity, or Compassion on your Mate, or Col- 
league, or Collaborator. 

The English language, then, is a language of great 
wealth — much greater wealth than can be illustrated 
by any brief example. But wealth is nothing unless you 
can use it. The real strength of English lies in the 
inspired freedom and variety of its syntax. There is no 
grammar of the English speech which is not comic in 
its stiffness and inadequacy. An English grammar 
does not explain all that we can do with our speech ; it 
merely explains what shackles and restraints we must 
put upon our speech if we would bring it within the 
comprehension of a school-bred grammarian. But the 
speech itself is like the sea, and soon breaks down the 
dykes built by the inland engineer. It was the fashion, 
in the eighteenth century, to speak of the divine Shake- 
speare. The reach and catholicity of his imagination 
was what earned him that extravagant praise; but his 
snytax has no less title to be called divine. It is not 
cast or wrought, like metal ; it leaps like fire, and moves 
like air. So is every one that is born of the spirit. Our 
speech is our great charter. Far better than in the long 
constitutional process whereby we subjected our kings 
to law, and gave dignity and strength to our Commons, 
the meaning of English freedom is to be seen in the il- 
limitable freedom of our English speech. 



22 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

Our literature is almost as rich as our language. 
Modern German literature begins in the eighteenth 
century. Modern English literature began with 
Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, and has been full 
of great names and great books ever since. Nothing 
has been done in German literature for which we have 
not a counterpart, done as well or better — except the 
work of Heine, and Heine was a Jew. His opinion of 
the Prussians was that they are a compost of beer, de- 
ceit, and sand. French literature and English litera- 
ture can be compared, throughout their long course, 
sometimes to the great advantage of the French. Ger- 
man literature cannot seriously be compared with 
either. 

It may be objected that literature and art are orna- 
mental affairs, which count for little in the deadly 
strife of nations. But that is not so. Our language 
cannot go anywhere without taking our ideas and our 
creed with it, not to mention our institutions and our 
games. If the Germans could understand what Chau- 
cer means when he says of his Knight that 

he lov^d chivalry, 
Truth and honour, freedom and courtesy, 

then indeed we might be near to an understanding. I 
asked a good German scholar the other day what is the 
German word for 'fair play'. He replied, as they do 
in Parliament, that he must ask for notice of that ques- 
tion. I fear there is no German word for ' fair play '. 
The little countries, the pawns and victims of Ger- 
man policy, understand our ideas better. The peoples 
who have suffered from tyranny and oppression look 
to England for help, and it is a generous weakness in 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 2:5 

us that we sometimes deceive them by our sjnnpathy, 
for our power is limited, and we cannot help them all. 
But it will not count against us at the final reckoning 
that in most places where humanity has suffered cruelty 
and indignity the name of England has been invoked : 
not always in vain. 

And now, for I have kept to the last what I believe 
to be the greatest gain of all, the entry of America into 
the War assures the triumph of our common language. 
America is peopled by many races ; only a minority of 
the inhabitants — an influential and governing minor- 
ity — are of the English stock. But here, again, the lan- 
guage carries it; and the ideas that inspire America 
are ideas which had their origin in the long English 
struggle for freedom. Our sufferings in this War are 
great, but they are not so great that we cannot recog- 
nize virtue in a new recruit to the cause. No nation, in 
the whole course of human history, has ever made a 
more splendid decision, or performed a more magnani- 
mous act, than America, when she decided to enter 
this War. She had nothing to gain, for, to say the bare 
truth, she had little to lose. If Germany were to domi- 
nate the world, America, no doubt, would be ruined ; 
but in all human likelihood, Germany's impious at- 
tempt would have spent itself and been broken long be- 
fore it reached the coasts of America. America might 
have stood out of the War in the assurance that her 
own interests were safe, and that, when the tempest 
had passed, the centre of civilization would be trans- 
ferred from a broken and exhausted Europe to a peace- 
ful and prosperous America. Some few Americans 
talked in this strain, and favoured a decision in this 
sense. But it was not for nothing that America was 



24 SOME GAINS OF THE WAK 

founded upon religion. "When she saw humanity in 
anguish, she did not pass by on the other side. Her en- 
try into the War has put an end, I hope for ever, to the 
family quarrel, not very profound or significant, which 
for a century and a half has been a jarring note in the 
relations of mother and daughter. And it has put an 
end to another danger. It seemed at one time not un- 
likely that the English language as it is spoken over- 
seas would set up a life of its own, and become sepa- 
rated from the language of the old country. A develop- 
ment of this kind would be natural enough. The Boers 
of South Africa speak Dutch, but not the Dutch spoken 
in Holland. The French Canadians speak French, but 
not the French of Moliere. Half a century ago, when 
America was exploring and settling her own country, 
in wild and lone places, her pioneers enriched the Eng- 
lish speech with all kinds of new and vivid phrases. 
The tendency was then for America to go her own 
way, and to cultivate what is new in language at the 
expense of what is old. She prided herself even on 
having a spelling of her own, and seemed almost will- 
ing to break loose from tradition and to coin a new 
American English. 

This has not happened ; and now, I think, it will not 
happen. For one thing, the American colonists left us 
when already we had a great literature. Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, and Spenser belong to America no less 
than to us, and America has never forgotten them. 
The education which has been fostered in American 
schools and colleges keeps the whole nation in touch 
with the past. Some of their best authors write in a 
style that Milton and Burke would understand and 
approve. There is no more beautiful English prose 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 25 

than Nathaniel Hawthorne's. The best speeches of 
Abraham Lincoln, and, we may truly add, of President 
Wilson, are merely classic English. During my own 
lifetime I am sure I have seen the speech usages of the 
two peoples draw closer together. For one thing, we 
on this side now borrow, and borrow very freely, the 
more picturesque colloquialisms of America. On in- 
formal occasions I sometimes brighten my own speech 
with phrases which I think I owe to one of the best of 
living American authors, Mr. George Ade, of Chicago, 
the author of Fables in Slang. The press, the tele- 
graph, the telephone, and the growing habit of travel 
bind us closer together every year; and the English 
that we speak, however rich and various it may be, is 
going to remain one and the same English, our common 
inheritance. 

One question, the most important and difficult of all, 
remains to be asked. Will this War, in its course and 
in its effects, tend to prevent or discourage later wars? 
If the gains that it brings prove to be merely partial 
and national gains, if it exalts one nation by unjustly 
depressing another, and conquers cruelty by equal 
cruelty, then nothing can be more certain than that the 
peace of the world is farther off than ever. When she 
was near her death, Edith Cavell, patriot and martyr, 
said that patriotism is not enough. Every one who 
thinks on international affairs knows this; almost 
every one forgets it in time of war. What can be done 
to prevent nations from appealing to the wild justice 
of revenge ? 

A League of Nations may do good, but I am sur- 
prised that any one who has imagination and a knowl- 
edge of the facts should entertain high hopes of it as a 



26 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

full solution. There is a League of Nations to-day 
which has given a verdict against the Central Powers, 
and that verdict is being enforced by the most terrible 
War in all human history. If the verdict had been 
given before the War began, it may be said, then Ger- 
many might have accepted it, and refrained. So she 
might, but what then? She would have felt herself 
wronged; she would have deferred the War, and, in 
ways that she knows so well, would have set about mak- 
ing a party for herself among the nations of the 
League. Wlio can be confident that she would have 
failed either to divide her judges, or to accumulate 
such elements of strength that she might dare to defy 
them ? A League of Nations would work well only if its 
verdicts were loyally accepted by all the nations com- 
posing it. To make majority-rule possible you must 
have a community made up of members who are rea- 
sonably well informed upon one another's affairs, and 
who are bound together by a tie of loyalty stronger and 
more enduring than their causes of difference. It would 
be a happy thing if the nations of the world made such 
a community; and the sufferings of this War have 
brought them nearer to desiring it. But those who be- 
lieve that such a community can be formed to-day or 
to-morrow are too sanguine. It must not be forgotten 
that the very principle of the League, if its judg- 
ments are to take effect, involves a world-war in cases 
where a strong minority resists those judgements. 
Every war would become a world-war. Perhaps this 
very fact would prevent wars, but it cannot be said 
that experience favours such a conclusion. 

There is no escape for us by way of the Gospels. The 
Gospel precept to turn the other cheek to the aggressor 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 27 

was not addressed to a meeting of trustees. Chris- 
tianity has never shirked war, or even much disliked it. 
Where the whole soul is set on things unseen, wounds 
and death become of less account. And if the Chris- 
tians have not helped us to avoid war, how should the 
pacifists be of use ? Those of them whom I happen to 
know, or to have met, have shown themselves, in the 
relations of civil life, to be irritable, self-willed, com- 
bative creatures, where the average soldier is calm, un- 
selfish, and placable. There is something incongruous 
and absurd in the pacifist of British descent. He has 
fighting in his blood, and when his creed, or his nervous 
sensibility to physical horrors, denies him the use of 
fighting, his blood turns sour. He can argue, and ob- 
ject, and criticize, but he cannot lead. All that he can 
offer us in effect is eternal quarrels in place of occa- 
sional fights. 

No one can do anything to prevent war who does 
not recognize its splendour, for it is by its splendour 
that it keeps its hold on humanity, and persists. The 
wickedest and most selfish war in the world is not 
fought by wicked and selfish soldiers. The spirit of 
man is immense, and for an old memory, a pledged 
word, a sense of fellowship, offers this frail and compli- 
cated tissue of flesh and blood, which a pin or a grain of 
sand will disorder, to be the victim of all the atrocities 
that the wit of man can compound out of fire and steel 
and poison. If that spirit is to be changed, or directed 
into new courses, it must be by one who understands it, 
and approaches it reverently, with bared head. 

The best hope seems to me to lie in paying chief at- 
tention to the improvement of war rather than to its 
abolition; to the decencies of the craft; to the style 



28 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

rather than the matter. Style is often more important 
than matter, and this War would not have been so 
fierce or so prolonged if it had not become largely a 
war on a point of style, a war, that is to say, to deter- 
mine the question how war should be waged. If the 
Germans had behaved humanely and considerately to 
the civil population of Belgium, if they had kept their 
solemn promise not to use poison-gas, if they had re- 
frained from murder at sea, if their valour had been 
accompanied by chivalry, the War might now have been 
ended, perhaps not in their disfavour, for it would not 
have been felt, as it now is felt, that they must be de- 
feated at no matter how great a cost, or civilization will 
perish. 

Even as things are, there have been some gains in 
the manner of conducting war, which, when future 
generations look back on them, will be seen to be con- 
siderable. It is true that modern science has devised 
new and appalling weapons. The invention of a new 
weapon in war always arouses protest, but it does not 
usually, in the long run, make war more inhuman. 
There was a great outcry in Europe when the broad- 
sword was superseded by the rapier, and a tall man of 
his hands could be spitted like a cat or a rabbit by any 
dexterous little fellow with a trained wrist. There was 
a wave of indignation, which was a hundred years in 
passing, when musketry first came into use, and a man- 
at-arms of great prowess could be killed from behind a 
wall by one who would not have dared to meet him in 
open combat. But these changes did not, in effect, make 
war cruder or more deadly. They gave more play to 
intelligence, and abolished the tyranny of the bully, 
who took the wall of every man he met, and made him- 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 29 

self a public nuisance. The introduction of poison-gas, 
which is a small thing compared with the invention of 
fire-arms, has given the chemist a place in the ranks of 
fighting-men. And if science has lent its aid to the 
destruction of life, it has spent greater zeal and more 
prolonged effort on the saving of life. No previous 
war will compare with this in care for the wounded 
and maimed. In all countries, and on all fronts, an 
army of skilled workers devote themselves to this single 
end. I believe that this quickening of the human con- 
science, for that is what it is, will prove to be the great- 
est gain of the War, and the greatest advance made in 
restraint of war. If the nations come to recognize that 
their first duty, and their first responsibility, is to those 
who give so much in their service, that recognition will 
of itself do more than can be done by any conclave 
of statesmen to discourage war. It was the monk 
Telemachus, according to the old story, who stopped 
the gladiatorial games at Rome, and was stoned by the 
people. If war, in process of time, shall be abolished, 
or, failing that, shall be governed by the codes of 
humanity and chivalry, like a decent tournament ; then 
the one sacrificial figure which will everywhere be 
honoured for the change will be the figure not of a 
priest or a politician, but of a hospital nurse. 



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